This article seeks to expand our understanding of the counterhegemonic aspects of Williams’s 1920s work by focusing on commonly overlooked and seemingly minor linguistic transformations. These transformations, the article argues, form a parallel to the overtly polemical statements that are more readily acknowledged as counter-hegemonic and demonstrate the scope of Williams’s engagement with the question of American writing in relation to what I view as the European hegemony at the time. Using the figure of the imagined puma interrupting an opera performance in The Great American Novel as the starting point for discussing the implications of the European hegemony in the realm of literature and the arts in the 1920s, this article subjects specific linguistic operations in Williams’s work to extensive analysis. The article argues that these linguistic transformations, offer important insights into Williams’s conception of poetry as resistance, i.e. into what might be called poetic agency.